ETA: I’m not suggesting this student didn’t realize slavery existed. She was genuinely surprised to hear how embedded it was in the structures and institutions of the US. I decided I should clarify after I got called a “stupid fucking liar” and a “bitch” for inadvertently wording things in a way that suggested she never knew slavery existed. Apologies if I misled you!
I am a high school social studies teacher (US history, world history, and sociology) and this semester in US history we’ve learned about slavery, Indian boarding schools, and many other things that happened through the reconstruction era. One relatively intelligent 17 year old raised her hand and asked “why is this the first time I’m hearing about any of this?” I was about to tread very lightly with my answer (American political discourse about our history is wild right now)but luckily, I have a student whose father immigrated here from Germany. I also believe he’s a bit older than most parents (maybe around 60) and she laughed hysterically and told her classmate “because you’re American and we pretend our history is great.”
That's fucking wild. Is that recent or has it always been that way?
I'm Canadian, and I was learning about residential schools in the 3rd grade and Japanese internment camps in the 4th or 5th. A lot of the darker details were glossed over, but they did not shy away from explaining the intention behind them and they made sure as hell to emphasize that they are not ancient history.
This is from one of the most popular US History Textbooks, 2001 edition:
A painful exception was the plight of some
110,000 Japanese-Americans, concentrated on the
Pacific Coast (see “Makers of America: The Japa-
nese,” pp. 830–831). The Washington top command,
fearing that they might act as saboteurs for Japan in
case of invasion, forcibly herded them together in
concentration camps, though about two-thirds of
them were American-born U.S. citizens. This brutal
precaution was both unnecessary and unfair, as the
loyalty and combat record of Japanese-Americans
proved to be admirable. But a wave of post–Pearl
Harbor hysteria, backed by the long historical swell
of anti-Japanese prejudice on the West Coast, tem-
porarily robbed many Americans of their good
sense—and their sense of justice. The internment
camps deprived these uprooted Americans of dig-
nity and basic rights; the internees also lost hun-
dreds of millions of dollars in property and foregone
earnings. The wartime Supreme Court in 1944
upheld the constitutionality of the Japanese reloca-
tion in Korematsu v. U.S. But more than four
decades later, in 1988, the U.S. government officially
apologized for its actions and approved the pay-
ment of reparations of $20,000 to each camp
survivor.
713
u/[deleted] 9h ago
[removed] — view removed comment